Hi Matt, between Therasauna and Sunlighten, which do you think is the better buy? It looks like you bought a lower end Therasauna and didn’t have a good experience with it. But I don’t see Sunlighten mentioned on your Certified Saunas list, any reason why? Just curious since you said in another video that Sunlighten makes good saunas. Also have you been back in a higher end Therasauna? Thanks for any direction!
Video Transcript (AI Generated)
All right, we are jamming through these.
Last question of the day.
So I don’t know if you guys know or not, but in two days I am flying to Maine.
I’ve been going to Maine for 29 years.
Going up there to do a little snowmobiling, also scout some land, hopefully to find 100 acres for the Clever compound.
Got some exciting news coming up.
I hope to do a health retreat in the next two to three years and also some custom sauna stuff, which would be really cool for folks to be able to fly in and experience some of this.
But don’t wanna reveal too much until I actually get the land deal done.
But anyway, I’ve been filming videos like crazy for the last few days.
I’ve got 26 videos done.
So that’ll take us all the way out until March 27th.
And I think I fly back on the 1st.
So I’ll try to film a few videos to fill in the gaps while I’m at grandma’s camp there up in Maine.
But hopefully if everything works right, you’ll see all these videos come out in chronological order thanks to YouTube’s scheduler that they now have.
So you can schedule a month’s worth of videos and don’t wanna leave you guys hanging for too long ’cause there’s tons of questions that haven’t been answered and people that I haven’t gotten back to.
So hopefully these videos will drip out in the, if I do it right.
If not, hopefully you don’t see this at the very end.
There is one problem where they kind of come out in reverse if I screw it up, but hope not.
Question is about Therasona versus Sunlighten.
Hi Matt, between Therasona and Sunlighten, which do you think is the better buy?
It looks like you bought a lower end Therasona in the past and don’t have good experience or didn’t have a good experience with it.
But I don’t see Sunlighten mentioned on your certified saunas list.
Any reason why?
Just curious since you said in another video a long time ago when you were taking a sauna that Sunlighten makes good saunas.
Also have been back in a, oh, also have you been back in a higher end Therasona since?
Thanks for any direction.
So yeah, this is kind of an apples to oranges comparison.
Therasona for folks that don’t know is a ceramic sauna.
Sunlighten primarily makes carbon powered saunas.
And this is a tough one for me to do.
Which do I think is the better buy out of Therasona and Sunlighten?
Well, they both have pros and cons.
And if I’m being really honest and I was buying it for myself, I wouldn’t choose either one of them because if I would, you’d see it in the other room and you’d see me sitting in that sauna whenever I do the sauna videos.
‘Cause that’s, you know, I can buy or choose or use or promote any sauna that I want.
There’s no stipulations on that.
Looks like you bought a lower end Therasona and didn’t have a good, yeah.
It was a cheaper Therasona.
I have heard since then that they’re more expensive Therasona models have heaters in the front and the build quality is better, but I’ve also heard some bad reports about the electronics going out, the LCD panel going out, people having issues.
I’ve also had some people personally call me that I know for a fact were Therasona customers.
And you can see their reviews on Amazon.
And one of the guys I even worked with, not worked with, but dealt with for some other stuff, there was two of them.
And they both said the same thing.
It took forever to heat up.
That was my experience with mine too.
So even if they could fix the build quality issues, you know, I don’t know.
And so let me just tell you the bottom line why Therasona saunas are not on the certified sauna list.
It’s because the EMF levels are too high.
So the thresholds to be on the certified sauna list are this, body voltage has to be under 200 millivolts.
Electric fields have to be under 200 volts per meter.
Magnetic fields have to be under one milligauss throughout the seated position.
And ideally we don’t want any electric field spikes over 200 volts per meter either, because that’ll make the body voltage too high.
So I can just tell you off the top of my head from the Therasona that I had, body voltage is in the three to four volts range, which means three to 4,000 millivolts.
So it is, what would that be?
20 times higher than I would like to see, or that you’ll find in any of the saunas on the certified sauna list.
Magnetic fields in the ceramic saunas have a decent 10 to 12 milligauss that you cannot shield.
So there’s no way to get away from that.
Therasona does a pretty good job about building out a backrest on the back to try to keep you away from the heaters a little bit.
But even with the grounded, you know, mesh shielding in the front of the heaters, there’s decent electric fields in there, and you’ve got body voltage.
So those EMFs are getting to the body in some fashion.
And so it just doesn’t make the cut when it comes to ultra low EMF saunas.
I was not impressed with the build quality of the Therasona at all.
It was awful.
They missed, you can go back and watch my video.
I mean, you can’t make this shit up.
They missed some cuts from the factory.
I had to take a saw to the sauna just to get it to go together.
The lights had a terrible flicker.
The stereo system had a hiss in it to where I had to unplug it and couldn’t use it.
It just wasn’t, for something that I paid $3,100 for, I mean, anybody would be pissed if that was the type of thing that you got.
The roof was broken, but I could have fixed it, so I don’t really count that too much.
So I mean, yeah, that was my experience with Sunlighten.
Or I’m, Jesus.
That was my experience with the Therasona.
You can go watch my old review.
It’s probably a year old now.
Next thing was, I don’t see Sunlighten mentioned on your certified sauna list.
Any reason why?
Yeah, I mean, so you also say, I said in another video that Sunlighten makes good saunas.
I did say that.
I do believe that.
The sauna build quality or the cabinet build quality, the woodworking construction quality of a Sunlighten is top-notch.
It might be the best in the industry, actually.
A Sunlighten Impulse is very well-built.
If a normal sauna is 200 to 300 pounds, a Sunlighten Impulse is probably 600 to 800 pounds.
They usually use three-quarter inch planking on all their stuff, solid wood.
They normally have five-eighths inch glass.
It’s very well-made.
Kudos to them.
But just them, their company culture as a whole, that company is just not really geared toward mitigating electric fields.
And so it’s not that their saunas are bad.
They’re just not within the thresholds of a certified sauna list.
So the EMF levels in an Impulse are way higher than I’d like them to be.
I mean, we’re talking 10 to 15 milligauss.
You can generate some spikes much higher than that in select areas, but it’s not areas that you would really cram your body into a corner or something like that.
So I don’t wanna bash them in that way and say that they’re super high EMF, ’cause they’re not.
They’re just not as low as I would like to see or for what I’m going for or we’re going for for the certified sauna stuff.
The build quality is awesome, but the EMF levels are just too high for what I would prefer.
And so there’s other saunas in the market that don’t have any of that.
And also the Sunlighten is one of the most expensive if you’re talking about the Impulse.
Now you can talk about the Sunlighten signature.
Again, the company as a whole is not geared towards mitigating electric fields.
So you may have a low magnetic field signature, but you’re probably not gonna have a super low body voltage signature.
It’s just not, the two go hand in hand.
And so if you have a decent amount of electric fields, you’re gonna have a decent amount of body voltage.
And so no matter what I like or say, one thing I will not compromise on is the thresholds that I set for the certified sauna list.
So it’s black and white.
And the reason that I did that is so that I’m not put between a rock and a hard place ever again, because companies will contact me and say, “Hey, we’ve got a low EMF sauna.”
And then I get one and then I test it and here we go.
I get in this predicament, well, it’s pretty low EMF, but they’re not doing this.
And then they don’t wanna change anything or whatever.
And then I’m kind of like, in a rock and a hard place.
Now, what I do is we have the certified sauna thresholds.
I test the saunas, it’s black and white line.
They either pass or they don’t.
It doesn’t matter if I like them.
It doesn’t matter if I paid for it, I got it for free.
I paid wholesale and got a discount.
None of that shit matters.
I set the guidelines, I strengthen them or I raise them for 2019, so that if people buy a sauna this year and something else comes out next year that tests better, you know that this year the requirements are so tight and the levels and the testing is so stringent that that sauna that comes out next year that tests a little bit better is only gonna be minutely better, not monumentally better.
So there’s not gonna be a huge gap.
And that’s one of the reasons that I tightened the requirements and I tightened up the threshold so much is so that that can’t happen ’cause that’s not fair to folks.
And so, you know, now it’s clear cut, it’s black and white.
Any sauna brand, doesn’t matter what it is, any model, it either passes the test or it doesn’t.
Now, if it does pass the test, it’ll make the certified sauna list and I’ll tell you the pros and cons.
I’ll tell you if I like it, I’ll tell you what I don’t like.
I’ll tell you which one is, you know, cheaper, which one is more expensive, yada, yada, yada.
And so, you know, that’s my thoughts.
What else did you ask?
Have I been back in a higher end TheraSauna?
No, I haven’t.
I mean, to be honest with you, as a first time customer and I had no, you know, I don’t have any relationship with TheraSauna at all.
I literally bought one online as a normal person with a credit card at full price, had it shipped to my house.
The experience was so bad that, you know, I don’t really have any desire to try a higher end TheraSauna because it’s gonna have the same ceramic heaters in it that the cheaper one had.
And so the EMF levels that I experienced are gonna be the same or similar, which are not even close to the threshold of the certified saunas.
If you go to my blog, cleverleverage.com and you look for the list of certified saunas, you will see that the top three literally have hardly any electric fields, hardly any magnetic fields, hardly any RF radiation, and hardly any body voltage compared to the competition.
I mean, there are saunas out there that have 40 plus thousand millivolts of body voltage.
And I’ve got saunas in the other room that have 200 millivolts or less of body voltage.
And so that is such a monumental difference.
You know, they’re just in a different stratosphere.
So I don’t wanna go through, it’s a ton of work for me to, you know, I just don’t think it’s going to make a difference.
That would be, you know, that’s pretty much my opinion.
And I would question the build quality after receiving something like that.
I also do not like some of the marketing practices by TheraSauna.
They market themselves as being made in the USA.
And so maybe some of their more expensive saunas, somebody brought this to my attention actually, ’cause I say in my TheraSauna review that that sauna was from China.
It was 100% from China.
That cabinet came from a fucking China factory.
I can guarantee it.
‘Cause it looked like all the others with the buckles that snaps together.
Same wood, same finish, same cheap everything.
Now I think they stuffed their heaters in it.
And that control panel in that TheraSauna was God awful.
It was the worst thing that I’ve ever used in my whole life.
Now I’m remembering some of this stuff.
It was a year ago.
So this is not fresh in my mind.
You’ll have to go watch the video to see exactly all the pros and cons.
But I don’t like it when a company, you know, says that they’re made in the USA and then they have other models that aren’t, but they don’t disclose that.
And so it’s very misleading to folks.
And I just don’t think that it’s good.
But that’s my opinions about the, you know, the TheraSauna.
If I could only choose between a TheraSauna and a Sunlighten, I would probably pick a Sunlighten Signature because the EMF levels are gonna be lower in that.
And if I couldn’t choose that, I would probably choose a TheraSauna over a Sunlighten Impulse because the EMF levels would be just a tad lower in that.
So at the top of the list would be a Sunlighten Signature, then a TheraSauna, then a Sunlighten Impulse, just based on the EMF levels.
If I were choosing those saunas based on build quality, it would be Sunlighten Impulse at the top.
It’s got higher EMFs in it though.
You’d have to, you know, not care about that at all.
Then I would probably say Sunlighten Signature.
And then I would say TheraSauna at the bottom.
If you were buying it just based on the wood quality or the build quality or the construction aspect of it.
If you were buying any of them based on EMF levels, I wouldn’t buy any of the three and I would just get something else.
I know that’s not what you wanna hear, but I had, you know, that’s the truth and that’s where I stand on it.
So I hope that helps.
If I miss something or, you know, if I got confused and misspoke about some of the models that does happen from time to time.
Sometimes, you know, I’ll say one brand in the video and then I don’t realize until somebody points it out on YouTube that I meant the other one.
Usually people are pretty good about, you know, connecting the dots, but sometimes, you know, it comes across wrong or I’ll say the wrong brand or I’ll say something bad or good about the wrong one.
If that’s the case and I missed something, you know, let me know in the comments and I can make another video.